Prince Valiant: Mapping New Ground

I'm not planning on playing the Prince Michael game until August but I figure that it won't hurt to start working on the scenario before I get to painting for it, especially since day time temperatures exceeding 32 degrees have made my painting desk, tucked under not yet insulated attic and eaves, uninviting .

From the archives, Prince Michael's first battle.

The main drive is partly to play a different sort of tabletop miniature game and partly to do an homage to the Prince Valiant comic strips. (As an aside, comic strip seems like an inappropriate term since the stories were not comic in nature but to re-label them as something else now smacks of revisionism and of confusing labels with substance.)  This game will bring three things to the table which are not usually seen there; skirmish gaming, magic and non-human figures, centaurs actually.

I did play a little D&D back around 1976 and did once have a few conventional wargame units (sic) of elves, dwarves, orcs and so on but its probably been more than 30 years since such a thing has appeared on my table. Skirmish games have not been as rare, I doubt if I've ever gone more than 5 years in between playing or staging one, but they aren't a main stay of my gaming despite trying to talk myself into it several times as the best way to do multiple periods.

The skirmish game is a natural for a Prince Valiant setting being at least if not more common than battles but I admit that the centaurs are just out of place. There were episodes with monsters such as giant reptiles but I don't recall ever seeing mythical creatures. Still, since I now have them, (they came bundled with other figures) I figure I may as well use them and I won't promise not to field goblins or dwarves or dragons at some future date, after all, these are Prince Michael's adventures. Magic is a little different. There was magic in Prince Valiant but it tends to leave you unsure as to whether it was real or smoke, potions and wisdom with perhaps a bit of "the second sight". I'll try to keep this in mind when drawing up rules.

Characters in waiting, all by Merten. left to right, front to back: mother and son, name unknown as yet, unknown lady, servant perhaps?, enchantress, Lady Lila with hawk, Princess Inara mounted and on foot (when priming the mounted princess could not be found until just after I'd finished which is a good guide to her character.) Back row, centaurs with one of the Dukes knights for comparison, the human half of these centaurs is big!!

A quest or task is often central to traditional adventures so the game will be based on such a task with the adventures being just things that happen along the way. The premise so far is Prince Michael and his companions have been tasked by Duke Stephen to proceed to Belmont Castle and then escort Princess Inara to the hunting lodge at Poplar Grove. Rather than take the long road around, he decides to take a short cut through the Perilous Forest.This is where we will begin.

 One of the reasons the forest is called Perilous is that it is criss crossed with paths that seem to change every time you go in. My idea at this point is to start with a table top forest with no paths. Each turn I will dice to see if there is 1,2,3 or 0 paths ahead and will then select one to follow for that turn. Once laid out, I will leave them on the table but I won't map them so they will be gone by the next day/game so when the Princess insists that Michael take her back through the forest to the hunting lodge rather than going around, it will be just as dangerous.

While travelling through the forest there will of course be encounters. Some dangerous, some benign, possibly even some helpful. I'm currently working on whether I want to roll for an encounter and then pick one of say a dozen pre-prepared ones or if I want to randomly place markers on the table and have Michael stumble on one if the path comes close. I'm not much on roll playing but luckily Prince Valiant was more about 3rd party narrative so I won't subject myself to role playing encounters and dicing for reactions, I'll just dice to see if the encounter is friendly, neutral or hostile and then resolve it, for example, an encounter with a witch might put the party to sleep with consequent loss of time and you sure don't want to be in the forest at night!

So far the following encounters are envisaged.
1) A party of Centaurs who may be hostile to trespassers
2) A witch/A beautiful enchantress
3) A large bear
4) A giant crocodile
5) A marauding band of Saxon raiders
6) A marauding band of Picts lying in ambush
7) A woman in distress and needing to be escorted to safety
8) A knight errant seeking fame and adventure


Any other suggestions?

Are those fireworks?

Happy Independence Day to my readers and friends from South of the Border. May there be many more to come.   (Oh and thanks for having invited us to join and I'm glad you're not still sore that we turned you down.)


In what seems to be a new tradition of games with no connection  to the current day of note,  here are some shots of today's Memoir 44 East Front game which I would have won if the victory conditions had been different.

Scenario 2 from the Red Book. The Huns brace themselves for their second attempt to cross the river and press deeper into Mother Russia.

Here we see me in my guise as Commissar picking my card a turn in advance. Improved my play no end. 

The scenario as usual, adapted smoothly to Memoir. Prior to picking sides Ron gratuitously threw in some trenches to thicken up the defenses. He was sorry later. The game opened with a tank battle raging across the river which ended with both sides pulling back to lick wounds. Ron then shifted the weight of his attack to the ford. I repulsed the first attack but as my casualties mounted and holes opened in my line I couldn't stop him from establishing a bridgehead. A counter attack by my armour backed by artillery brought him to the brink of defeat but he counter attacked in turn. 

Initially Ron assigned the defender a break point of 7 and the attacker a break point of 9 but before we started he asked if I'd rather have both sides have the same breakpoint. I waffled. When he destroyed my 7th unit he asked if I wanted to play on till 9 units so I flipped the  hidden card revealing an off table barrage from heavy guns, blowing his 9th unit to smithereens. Since we hadn't settled it in advance and since he had just gifted me with my own copy of Battlecry, it seemed only right that his prior victory should stand. Another exciting squeaker of a game where the advantage had shifted back and forth.

Year 4 - A look ahead.

The Queen's Lancers in training. One sample lancer is now painted and the rest are well on their way.

Well, three years have now passed since my heart attack and I'm still here!  I was going to look at plans for the year ahead but on the whole its steady as she goes. I feel that I've settled questions of rules, game scale and feel and so on, so this year I want to spend a little more time preparing games and designing some new scenarios. I also want to mix some different games along with the more of the same. 

I expect July to be a slow game month but starting in August I have a few things that I want to do. 

Prince Valiant. Rather than bringing out my Elastolins for a conventional game,   I want to design and play an adventure/quest skirmish game with Prince Michael and a small party travelling across the table and having random adventures possibly leading to a follow up battle game. Lots of design and prep work to be done as well as some painting of ladies, witches, centaurs and 'knights'.

Atlantica. I've been really enjoying painting up toy soldiers from the 2nd half of the 19thC, takes me back to my pre-wargaming days when I used to convert Britain's toys into models. Based on experimentation I don't think I would be happy with scaled down late 19thC big battles in 40mm. It seems to me that the optics are just wrong unless I were to adopt a more overtly abstract approach using a small number of figures in a mini-diorama on a pedestal base with label and a set of rules designed to treat the base as a playing piece and that's not where I want this collection to go. Perhaps another project sometime in the future. Instead, I'll continue to work towards smaller encounters with a Colonial flavour and a back story. Lots of Red coats and Native Atlanticans  to be sculpted and cast and scenery to be made. It'll take a while but I'm looking forward to it. 

40mm Oberhilse troops trying Seminary Ridge on for size. I was able to fit almost the same number of figures on the same frontage but it just didn't feel like a big battle. At first I blamed it on the depth of the units but I think it has more to do with the optics of the height of the figures  and terrain compared to how far away/close the enemy is. I tried fewer larger units and just fewer figures over all but the lack of manoeuvre room and the look didn't encourage me to continue.

Other games?  Expect a 16thC game, more 1/72nd ACW, and some of whatever takes my fancy.